Final thoughts

Overall I am happy with the finished result, however there are minor details I would change, as has been highlighted throughout my blog. I would have also spent more time on the texturing and detailing of the models and scenery. I am not a particularly creative person and struggle with anything artistic, however I persevered with this and tried to get the best work out of myself, and I believe it mostly worked. I also think my animation needed work, particularly the speed of the ships in each scene, as I feel it varies too much.

I enjoyed the project to a degree, however that may be more due to the content, as I am a lifelong Star Wars fan. However that is not to say I did not find it interesting, however I am just not artistic at all, and prefer the more technical (and normally programming based) sides to the course, and game development as a whole.

Editing the video

Editing the video was simple, as I kept my scene lengths exact, so all I had to do was edit the video to 30fps to create a 30 second long clip. For the editing I used Freemake Video Converter, a free piece of software I found online. I searched for a new piece of software as when I used the newest version of windows movie maker, I could not save the final edited product as a .avi file as required. With the software I found I simply had to add the files in and it patched them together to create a final product at the correct resolution at the correct frame rate, creating a finished 30 second video.

Animation part 6

My final scene was the most simple, the X-wing just gets escapes from the exploding death star, getting closer to the camera. The Background is a screen cap from the film with the millenium falcon edited out in gimp, to create a simple explosion in space texture. This is my final scene, and ends the story I tried to convey rather neatly I felt.

Animation part 5

This was one of the more complicated shots in my animation, as I had to have the three ships moving forwards, then have the x wing loop around, shoot the others, and carry on. I am really happy with the TIE fighters spinning out and the X-wings loop, however I feel that the speed of the whole scene is completely off, and the middle is a lot slower than the start and end. I also used the visibility toggling in this scene for the exploding TIE fighters and the lasers. However I feel that as a whole I got the overall outcome I desired in my original planning.

Animation part 4

In this scene, the TIE fighters "shoot" down the two outer X-wings then all three fly over. I liked how I made the X-wings crash using translation and the visibility toggle I mentioned before, however there are many things I would change, such as the ships not actually being shot by anything instead of using the lasers like the scene before, and then simply disappearing into thin air, rather than exploding, using something like a particle effect, however I felt learning to use this effect was not time effective for the payoff.

Animation part 3

This scene was simple, but was more difficult to create than I previously imagined. I could not find a way to rotate the guns and base together, yet also move the guns independently for aiming and shooting. However all in all I believe the effect works well. In this scene I also learned a new technique for creating the laser beams, in which I toggle the visibility at certain frames to create the laser beams at the correct times, and not have to have them linger in the gun. This is my favourite scene, as although simple, I believe the effect is true to the film.

Animation part 2

This scene was a little more complicated, as the ships bank down into the trench at different points, to create a squadron feel to the whole thing. The camera also moves and rotates in this scene, although not a huge amount, and the ships also fly off the scene together. I think this scene did not work brilliantly, I am happy with the banking, however it does look like the ships fly in together, stop and bank, and then fly away, with no sense of forward movement in the middle, which should have been fixed, possibly by texturing the trench and moving that at a constant speed to convey movement.

Animation part 1

This first  scene was a simple one, just a camera rotation and moving all three fighters together as one, giving the effect the a quick flyby. To improve this scene I should have used a path to move the ships, and used the curve editor to create a more even speed throughout the movement.

Texturing X-Wing.

For my X-wing, I decided to texture the majority of the ship with a solid colour, then use unwrapping and GIMP to texture the blocks on the fuselage and wings. I picked GIMP because it's free so I can use it at home.
Using max to make sure I was selecting the right polygons, I used boxes and filling to create the shapes for the colouring on the fuselage and wings.

This is the texture I used for the wings, as you can see it is a simple grey with a little red detailing, as it is on the ship.

This it my Fuselage texture, red for the sides, where one short piece and one long piece attach, yet are separate on this due to the UVW unwrapping and flattening, and yellow for the top.

However, when I imported this into max after exporting from GIMP, the red and yellow showed up as blue and green. This issue was rectified by opening the image again in photoshop and overwriting the save from there, which saved the RGB values to be correctly opened in max. 

Here is my finished, textured X-wing, ready for animation, and I believe it holds fairly well to the original, the main issue being the seams between the two sides of fuselage parts.